Wellcome Trust aims to provide a home for long-form science journalism online with launch of Mosaic

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The Wellcome Trust is launching a new online magazine tomorrow which aims to provide a home for long-form science-based journalism.

Mosaic will be updated on a weekly basis with 3,000-plus word articles going up every Tuesday.

All the content will be made available to other publishers under a creative commons licence, meaning it can appear in other websites and print publication for free provided it has the necessary attribution.

Wellcome Trust head of communications Mark Henderson is editor-in-chief of the new title. As science editor of The Times, Henderson was closely involved with the launch of that title’s award-winning monthly science supplement Eureka – which was published from 2009 to 2012.

Mosaic is edited by Giles Newton and has an editorial board which includes former New Scientist editor Roger Highfield and and psychologist and broadcaster Claudia Hammond.

It also has two commissioning editors and a part-time picture editor.

Henderson said: "We are trying to commission the sort of content that newspapers don’t commission as much as we would like. It’s expensive, people don’t have the places to put it and its risky.

“We feel long-form science feature journalism for a general audience is important. We want people to engage in a national conversation about science and we want to promote that.”

Henderson said that Mosaic will not be about promoting the Wellcome Trust, but will carry articles looking broadly at the area of biomedical science “because that’s our area of interest”.

He said: “We are just looking to commission really good feature writing about biomedical science.”

Mosaic has a six-figure budget and will have a website which uses responsive design to ensure it renders well on all screen sizes.

The Wellcome Trust said in a statement: “Mosaic will publish compelling, narrative-based articles each week, of up to several thousand words, exploring each subject from various angles and ensuring readers are better placed to ask questions about science. So far, Mosaic has commissioned several high-profile writers, including Carl Zimmer, Rose George, Virginia Hughes, Ed Yong and Jenny Diski, whose work will feature in the first few editions."